We have in our grubby little hands an advance copy of "The Sopranos: The Book" -- it won't be released until May 15 -- and it's very much like the show.

In-your-face, graphic and a little raunchy.

Oh, it starts calmly enough, with show creator David Chase reminiscing about the show's origins.

"I started to think about this feature film idea in which a New Jersey mobster was having trouble with his mother because he had put her in a nursing home instead of letting her live with him, which is the old Italian way of doing things," Chase recalls.

It gets better, and bloodier, and more colorful, as author Brett Martin details the HBO show's past and present in rapid-fire chapters -- Tony and Carmela's North Jersey McMansion; the makeup artists; sex and "The Sopranos"; the various kinds of mayhem practiced on the show ("We've already had triple the number of murders that organized crime has ever committed," Chase notes), and other mobbed-up topics.

There's a handy glossary to food on the show (learn how to pronounce "gabagool" and "prociutt"); prop master Diana Burton's recipe for her Grandma Aggie's "Sunday gravy," not to mention multiple references to baked ziti.

Inside information -- Harriman State Park, just over the border in New York State, became the stand-in for season three's "Pine Barrens" episode when an Essex County official nixed location shooting at South Mountain Reservation because the show was "a disgrace to Italians."

Classic bits of dialogue are sprinkled through the text ("I could stick this fork in your eye!"), and there are a whole lot of words and phrases we can never print in this newspaper.

"It's an item of faith on the show that all this effort (at finding locations) is worth it to get New Jersey -- the real New Jersey -- on the screen in all its tacky/classy, goofy/serious, ugly/beautiful splendor," Martin writes.

Any book that opens with a two-page photo of the Pulaski Skyway against a blood-red sky is a book we can't refuse.